[Windcatcher]

Bleh. I should have mentioned that about the texturing. There should be a separate texture for each body part (that is, skeleton bone), but only one mesh for the entire model (or at most, one mesh for the head and one mesh for the rest of the body). Separate meshes isn't important unless you want to have alternates -- for example, *all* player models all have four alternate heads: bare, wearing leather, wearing chain, and wearing plate. A few also have alternate body meshes, such as armored or robed high elves. By contrast, monster models have alternate mesh heads for different types (e.g. cyclops or hill giant) but always only one body mesh.

A textured model per week is fantastic. I wouldn't even be able to keep up. I already have a .3DS file parser, but as far as I know it doesn't support bones. Maybe the thing to do is export the same model in a bunch of different formats and I can see what I can read. I have a parser for Quake III and I might have one for half-life (not sure, though). I can always scour the net for readers for different formats and convert to Delphi if I have to.

Another thng I forgot: there are some "special" bones in WLD models that don't have any polys. These are for item attachments such as weapons and shields. There should be one for each hand and a shield bone on the left arm. There should also be one for the helmet and one for what they call the guild (sits above the head). Old-world player models have helmets in the head mesh and have non-zero alpha values assigned to the helmet polys so the client can assign tints to them, so the helmet bone is unused for them, but it's used for helmet items that have their own meshes. We can tweak the lengths and orientations of these bones at a later time, but they should exist. Basically the held object bones point along the direction of a prospective held weapon, the shield bone points out through the shield, and the helmet and guild bones point straight up.

Edit: actually I think there are two bones per hand: one for a weapon and one that points to the side somehow for held books and such. I'm not 100% sure about this, but it should be easy do deal with these polygon-less bones anyway since they shouldn't ever move with any animations.